[Paper] Efficiently Learning Drifting Halfspaces with Massart Noise

Source: arXiv - 2606.11149v1

Overview

We study the problem of learning a drifting concept in the presence of Massart noise. In this framework, an online learner has access to a history of independent samples whose labels are noisy versions of a target concept that may change from round to round. The goal is to output, in each round, a hypothesis with small prediction error. We study the complexity of this learning problem for the fundamental class of margin-separable linear classifiers (halfspaces). On the positive side, we give a computationally efficient learner achieving error $η+ \tilde O(Δ^{1/3}/γ)$, where $η$ upper bounds the Massart noise rate, $Δ$ is the drift rate, and $γ$ is the margin. Interestingly, in the realizable setting, an adaptation of our techniques yields an efficient learner with an improved error rate over prior work. On the lower-bound side, we provide formal evidence of an information-computation tradeoff, strongly suggesting that our algorithm’s performance is essentially optimal. Specifically, while the information-theoretically optimal error scales with $Δ^{1/2}$, we prove that $Δ^{1/3}$-scaling is unavoidable for low-degree polynomial tests, even in the special case of random classification noise.

Key Contributions

This paper presents research in the following areas:

• cs.LG

Methodology

Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.

Practical Implications

This research contributes to the advancement of cs.LG.

Authors

• Mingchen Ma
• Guyang Cao
• Jelena Diakonikolas
• Ilias Diakonikolas

Paper Information

• arXiv ID: 2606.11149v1
• Categories: cs.LG
• Published: June 9, 2026
• PDF: Download PDF